Nuavia Stewart
The Corsair
Buying textbooks can be very costly and many bookstores are creating new ideas for college students to take advantage of those options. Buy, rent, and sell options are available and can save you lots of cash and allow you to stretch your budget.
Online bookstores such as Barnes& Noble, Amazon.com and Dealoz.com offer a variety of alternatives. With discounts on new and used books, the prices are almost half (if not cheaper) than what you would pay at the campus bookstores. Online bookstores also offer electronic e-books, straight to your e-reader or your Mac or PC, an advantage traditional bookstores don’t offer.
Derrick Conner, a freshman student on the Pensacola campus, says he started buying his textbooks on Amazon.com after paying only a tenth of what he would normally pay at the school bookstore.
“My girlfriend told me about going online and buying my textbooks,” he said. “At first I thought there must be a catch or some membership I have to purchase, but when I checked it out I ordered my earth science book for only $20 used. It would have cost me $140 used at the campus bookstore.”
For example, the price for the LB Brief English Comp textbook, a “hot seller” at the campus bookstore, is $44.50 new and $33.50 used. Here is what you would pay on:
Dealoz.com – $13.52 used. Dealoz.com is a resourceful search engine for comparing prices with some of the top online dealers. It offers coupons and buy, sell and rent options.
Amazon.com – $26.00 used plus shipping and handling of $3.99. The trade in cost currently is $19.25 so the net cost is $10.74
BN.com new/used from $36.03-$26.78 and rentals from $17.07.
Amazon.com seems to be the most student-friendly. Students who shop on Amazon can take advantage of the Amazon Prime. The cost is $39. With the membership you get unlimited two-day shipping, unlimited video streaming on thousands of movies and television shows as well as deals and promotions exclusively for students.
With the Amazon Kindle save up to 80% off the list price of the print textbook. No need to purchase a Kindle, you can view books from Your Mac or PC. Also get up to 70% back on your book trade-in’s with Amazon’s trade-in program. They give you the option of selling them yourself or trading your buy back’s for a Amazon gift card.
With technology evolving, so are the ways we are reading. E-books are a fairly new and hip way to carry your books, and you can carry as many books as you want. No worrying about returning the books, or selling them and no waiting for your books in the mail. They are environmentally friendly; if you are concerned about saving our rainforests e-readers are the way to go! Just download them to your MAC, PC, NOOK or Kindle and you are all set.